Struggling with frugality, debt, parenting, and weight

August 2015 Early Retirement Progress

We contributed $4,844.74 this month to our retirement accounts, and we lost $25,029.45 in investment value this month (not including September 1 🙁 ).

Holy volatility! We’re down almost 10k for the year, despite putting in over 45k, so we’ve “lost” 55k just this year. This money is for long term use, so it’s not that concerning to me, but I still don’t like to see my balances drop that much! It does make our numbers look bad, but we’re not touching this money for at least 15 years – I’m confident that we’ll make it back up in that time.

My immediate concern is that the balance in my Roth IRA has dropped below the 10k needed for the Fidelity Advanage class fund, so I might end up back in the Investor class fund paying slightly more in management fees. I’m pretty sure we’ll be under the MAGI for a Roth this year, but I don’t want to add more money into the account until I’ve done our taxes to make sure 🙁 That won’t be until about February/March.

I’m trying to rework our budget to add more money into retirement accounts while the market is “on sale”, but it’s not really happening. The regular contributions are still going on, but we want to get out of the cash flow problem first, so taxable contributions have stopped other than the cash back from my Fidelity Visa.

We can only control how much we contribute, so that’s what I’m focusing on. Have your investments done as poorly (or as well) as ours?

2015 Totals

In 2015, so far, we’ve contributed $45,650.04 (65.21% of our goal of 70k), and we’ve lost $9483.22 in investment value (-39.72% of our planned total).